As Broadway reopens, Scott Rudin has been banished — perhaps for the good, perhaps permanently. But also, perhaps, not. benjwallace reports
Illustration: Zohar Lazar To hear them tell it, the Broadway professionals whose careers Scott Rudin dominated for decades don’t sound too torn up about his cancellation. “People are really worried about me,” one longtime Rudin collaborator told me rather breezily this summer. “ ‘Are you going to be okay? You’re so closely linked to Scott.
A phantom Rudin looms in countless ways. Ambitious young playwrights have to wonder who will pay as much as Rudin would for their work, or be able to put it on Broadway with the same flair, or help them cross into commercial screenwriting. Surely, at least a few of Rudin’s stable of preferred actors — used to above-market fees for career-making roles — can’t shake the worry that the same chances won’t present themselves.
Someone had to be Scott Rudin’s first assistant. His name was Joseph, and the two grew up together in the small town of Baldwin on Long Island’s South Shore. Even then, Rudin stood out for his precocious obsession with theater, regularly taking the train into the city to see shows and memorizing Playbills. “When he was 15, he was going on 35,” says Joseph, who asked to be identified by his middle name.
Long before he became notorious for throwing objects — a litany that includes scripts, BlackBerrys, cell phones, car phones, desk phones, pens, pencils, cups of coffee, TV remotes, Baccarat crystal, staplers, books, chairs, paper clips, dishware, baked potatoes, chicken salad, and a MacBook — Rudin was himself the target of a workplace missile.
At Fox, for the first time in his career, Rudin occupied a position of genuine power, and he seemed to come into his own as a horrible boss — bluntly insulting his assistants, firing and un-firing them repeatedly, deploying gifts and crumbs of praise when it served him. He was on a strict diet and working out with a trainer, and an assistant who was being emotionally “beaten up” by Rudin suggests a confluence of causes: “Having to be in the closet doesn’t help.
Inevitably, people who worked with Rudin wondered how he had gotten that way. A 1993 profile in the Times, in which Rudin said he had “never been nurtured,” described him as being estranged from his parents. He told the writer he hadn’t been home to Baldwin in ten years and had seen his mother and father only twice during that time. He wasn’t sure where his father currently worked.
He singled out one assertion — that he had once said to someone, “You’re a function; why would you think you’re anything more than a function?” — for a long response: “I do think when you’re making what is intended to be a work of art, then yes — everybody is in fact a function. I include myself in this perhaps more strongly even than I would the rest of the team.
Visitors to Rudin’s West 45th Street office were often surprised — it was convenient for walking to theaters but otherwise unimpressive, with a small, uncomfortable reception area. The bulk of the miserable staff worked in a bullpen; executives had “these caves of despair and solitude,” as one described them. Assistants kept on hand framed backups for the movie and Broadway posters on the walls, so when Rudin broke one, it could be replaced right away.
Rudin liked to have an audience for his cruelties, and his aggression was hardly confined to underlings. He would write demeaning emails to colleagues at other companies and bcc dozens of others. On the set of The Stepford Wives, an assistant recalls, Rudin was on the phone with Sherry Lansing, the powerful chief of Paramount. He muted her to say, “I need a pen, tape, and paper.
Their occasional joint ventures were inevitably explosive, as with a 2002 adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours. In one sense, it was Rudin at his best, seeing cinematic potential in an unlikely book about three women who deal with suicide and moving heaven and earth to make it happen.
But Rudin was making some of his best movies just as the market for them — that is, critically acclaimed mid-budget stand-alone dramas — was drying up. With creative energy and resources shifting to superhero movies and prestige TV, he signed a first-look deal at HBO. There things went as they always did with Rudin: well, and then not well. He discovered HBO was a different sort of corporate beast from the Hollywood studios.
Rudin would produce four or five shows year after year with startling variety: inspired revivals and originals, both plays and musicals. Broadway aficionados appreciated that, as one puts it, Rudin was “the only one who’s going to do an interesting revival of Three Tall Women, Shuffle Along, or Waverly Gallery.” When it came to experimental new work, a Rudin investor says, “Doll’s House 2 should be on Broadway, but today it would never be produced by anyone but Scott, and I love him for that.
As it often did. In Hollywood, Rudin had been merely one monster among many, but in the comparative sandbox of Broadway, he could operate more like a Mafia don. He lorded over the Theater District’s precious real estate. The Times was the focus of much of his attention. Growing up, the “Arts & Leisure” section had been his portal to Narnia, and at his apartment in the San Remo, he had a wooden cabinet containing binders of copies of every edition back to the 1910s.
This system seemed to run smoothly enough until 2017’s Hello, Dolly! Although it had been projected to gross $1.4 million a week, during Bette Midler’s time as Dolly it regularly grossed nearly double that. Capitalized at just $16 million, in its first 18 months it grossed $128 million. Considering that only one in five Broadway shows even recoups its investment, it was to all appearances a smash, but investors saw an underwhelming 8 percent profit.
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